Promoting Your Business With Affiliate Marketing

This section looks at how you can promote your business website using affiliate marketing, where you pay other sites (usually known as publishers) based on results for displaying your ads. This is mainly useful if you have an online shop, or allow people to send their orders using an online form which you then process over the phone. Otherwise you are paying for people to visit your site when they cannot actually buy anything without contacting you in other ways.

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Affiliate marketing is basically advertising that works on a results basis. Where you pay nothing to be shown on a site, but pay every time your advert leads to an enquiry or sale.

Commission Payments

Your commission payments are usually calculated in one of three ways:

Cost Per Sale – You pay a fixed amount per sale; if you sell several products there may be different amounts for each product. e.g. £5 for a £100 product and £10 for a £200 product.

Cost Per Lead / Cost Per Enquiry – You pay a fixed amount for every enquiry you generate, this usually means a customer providing their phone number to be called back, or registering their details to be contacted by you.

Percentage of Sale – You pay a percentage of every sale recorded through the publisher, this is often used for sites that sell a wide variety of products (e.g. Office supplies, games, sports good, etc).

The amount of commission you choose for each type of payment needs to depend on how much money you make from sales, and what proportion of enquiries turn into sales. You also need to ensure that the amount you offer makes your scheme worthwhile to publishers.

For more detail on the types of payment used in online advertising visit Pricing of Your Online Advertisement - Where to Place It?.